Thanks for taking the time to contribute to the jQuery project! Please provide a complete reduced test case on jsFiddle to help us assess your ticket.

Additionally, be sure to test against the jQuery git("edge") version to ensure the issue still exists. To get you started, use this boilerplate: http://jsfiddle.net/FrKyN/. Open the link and click to "Fork" (in the top menu) to get started.

@Wikinaut this isn't the place to report anything. Can you go to our bug tracker, http://bugs.jquery.com and provide a test case? Be sure you're not in Quirks mode, which jQuery has never supported.

Honestly. A couple of years ago I checked with John Resig to confirm that we never ever supported Quirks. Yes, sometimes things kinda sorta work. But we never supported Quirks mode, and have never run unit tests in them.

So, GitHub's recent notifications shuffle means I wasn't getting notifications from the Pull Request thread, so I'm just joining the conversation. Sorry, I'm late to the game. I'm the engineer who wrote the patch that allegedly broke IE8.

If what you're saying is true, then I should be getting different results in Firefox and IE8 when this code runs under jQuery 1.7.2 and jQuery 1.8.0 (by flipping the select drop down). It would seem that jQuery 1.7.2, jQuery 1.8.0, and jQuery Edge all yield the same results for $(window).height() under IE8 and Firefox when standards mode is in use.

I can only reproduce the behavior you're describing by running IE8 in quirks mode. I, too, suspect that is the cause of your troubles.